Some people act out of pure malice. There IS such thing as people who not only don't contribute, they have a SUBSTANTIAL net negative effect on a project, and they are doing it on purpose. This is destructive behavior and it should be eliminated.
The only way to deal with a troll is to ignore the troll. If he pisses you off, he's won.
Well good for you. What if it was 95% negative?
Then what I was doing probably sucked and I should listen to them. If it was 95% positive, I changed the content/presentation/whatever and then I got 95% negative (e.g. KDE4) I'd know I fucked up badly and try to fix it. Being a prima dona is counterproductive. You can't please everybody but if you're pleasing nobody you're doing it wrong.
How would you like to work with a dead, maggot-infested cat on your desk, or in a room with flickering lights, or with loud rap/country/ska/harpsichord/whatever music playing
I'd quit and do the same thing somewhere else.
What if you sat on a barstool and your boss kicked it out from under you every time he walked by?
I'd have him arrested for assault.
Ask any sociologist "do negative people have a negative effect on a group's performance?" and you will hear a "yes" EVERY FUCKING TIME.
It's not just science, it's common sense. If there's a group of devs on your team and one is negative, kick him out of the group. If he's not part of the group then ignore him. Feeding trolls is counterproductive.
If he's your fan, politely set him straight. If he's your competitor's fan, ignore him like you would a troll. If he's a fan that's complaining that you ruined his favorite feature you should reevaluate what you did.
Plus, the idea of robots with emotions is a stupid idea, as the late Douglas Adams so hilariously lampooned in HHGTG. When it's robots it's machines. You're not supposed to take it seriously, and emotional machines reminds you of this. They're androids, not replicants.
Don't anthropomorphize machines, they hate it when you do that.
Not voting is also a vote. When there is no real difference between the candidates offered, how do you protest?
Everyone I know who doesn't vote says this. Corporate media says it's apathy, so your vote doesn't count! You're voting for the status quo. And corporate media says that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote.
You, or if not you then some of your friends or family smoke marijuana. Voting for someone who wants your cousin jailed for growing a plant is far worse than a wasted vote, and the Republicans and Democrats are both prohibitionist parties. If you're conservative, vote Libertarian. If you;re liberal than vote Green. Liberal and Green are votes for "none of the above". Not going to the polls means you're fine with how things are.
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" -- Rush.
Careful, there are a few right wing loonies around here. You should point out that the quote was from the Canadian band Rush's lyrics. Or put on your asbestos suit.
Even though neither moderation or editing what shows up on your own site is censorship, I agree completely, that's how you should moderate and is how I moderate. After all, "overrated" is just a polite way of saying "-1, brain-dead stupid" when it doesn't mean "not bad but it doesn't deserve a +4."
I don't care what people do on the websites they own. If there are too many trolls and not enough reasoned discussion I leave. If it looks like they're editing, I'll leave. If the site annoys me, I leave.
As to goatse, I don't follow shortened URLs any more.
The AC above said I should browse at -1, why? I've seen few comments at -1 that are worth seeing. If I want to read one, I can. But even as fast as I read I can't finish the internet and it's senseless to browse at -1 unless I'm moderating.
Really? How about the idea that having a bunch of lame-ass mooches, trolls, and flamers causing nothing but drama increases the stress level of developers and causes them to abandon projects entirely?
And that excuses censorship? Pretty damned cowardly, if you ask me. Stress levels is an excuse for censorship?
The projects don't complete or get kicked way back on deadline waiting for someone else to pick them up, learn the code, learn to extend it, and finish it off. If they ever do, since those same lame-ass trolls and flamers are waiting to pounce again.
That's just pathetic. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Nobody's irreplaceable. If it gets behind schedule it gets behind schedule. Nobody's life is on the line here.
OR, the lame-ass trolls need to grow up.
Yes, they should. They annoy me, too. Let me know if you ever figure out a way to make that happen.
Look, I get it. You're 14, you live in your parents' basement, and to you swearing is only nominally less exciting than a furtive glimpse at a pair of tits. You think it makes you sound grown up.
I'm 61 years old. I was in South East Asia in the USAF at the end of the Vietnam war. Your reading comprehension isn't too good, did you miss the part where I ran a popular Quake site from my crib, since according to you I was an infant? Do you realize how stupid that makes you look?
But there's a right way and a wrong way to phrase things, a right way and a wrong way to handle conflict, and a right and wrong way to deal with drama.
When someone advocates censorship, the only rational response is FUCK OFF AND DIE. That's exactly what profanity is for, to demonstrate beyond all doubt that this kind of shit pisses you off. The fact that an open source guy advocates censorship pisses me off. It wouldn't have bothered me if it had come from a Microsoft or Apple employee, I'd have thought it was hilarious.
I ran self-censorship when I had that web site, until the very end when some of the same crap spewed from an opinion on one of the bigger sites saying the same as this. I thought "wait a minute, this isn't a children's site." There was vulgarity afterwords, albeit in moderation. The same when I started my/. account (a fourteen year old with a five digit UID?), although I didn't comment much. Same with K5 before it died some time after I left.
You would not like my journals, the characters are "colorful" for lack of a better word.
"I don't like censorship, darn it" just doesn't cut it. Even FUCK CENSORSHIP AND THE HORSE IT RODE IN ON is too mild.
Hell, the reason I never made the jump to using Linux on the desktop was my own experiences trying to set up a Mythbox in my living room; because I didn't have the exact hardware that one of the developers had, asked for some help, got shouted at "RTFM you fucking loser" over and over again when the documentation was crap and had no relevance to the situation I was asking about... screw it.
I've heard that story before, but never experienced it myself when I was learning Linux at the turn of the century. Maybe things have changed since then, but obviously people shouldn't act like that. I don't like what they do and wonder if maybe they're really enemies of open source (MS shills; MS hates "open sores" and called it a cancer), but everyone has the right to be a jerk, and nobody has a right to not be offended.
For fucks' sake, guys, do you two work for Apple or Microsoft? Every big corporation is evil, but when they do good is not the time to bash them, no matter what their real motives are.
If you don't work for Apple or MS, grow the fuck up. Sheesh. Dumb kids... the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If they're not against you they're for you.
I read it. Pretty lame, and I've been using KDE for ten years (skipped 4, it sucked). There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing, just WAAH!! OMG, TROLLS AND FLAMERS!
I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article. If you get even the tiniest bit of recognition you're going to have that. From 1998 to 2002 I had a fairly popular Quake site that was popular enough that every mega site wanted to host me. Yeah, I got hate mail, but not much, and so fucking what anyway? 95% of the mail was YOU ROCK, DUDE!!
This guy needs to grow up and grow a pair. Haters don't hurt open source, and BTW, I HATE GNOME!
I wish I could find a link to the story, but a few years ago a book publisher commissioned a study to see how much in sales he was losing to piracy. Since it takes a few weeks for pirate versions of books to show up, they looked at sales figures to see how much sales dropped when the pirate version was available. The researchers and publisher were amazed to discover that rather than a drop in sales, there was a spike in sales!
Corey Doctorow credits his status as a best selling author to the fact that he puts his ebooks on boingboing for free.
Of course there will be a few folks like your friend, but study after study has shown that music pirates spend a lot more money on music than non-pirates. No study except some commissioned by the RIAA or MPAA has shown loss in sales caused by piracy.
DRM often causes me to pirate. I'll buy a DVD and after fifteen minutes of unskippable piracy warnings and trailers I'll get a torrent started to get a non-cripppled version of it.
The irony of DRM is that it's never stopped a single pirate, but it's driven customers to piracy because the pirate version is usually just better.
Pirating software is just plain stupid, you're begging to be pwned. Music, movies, and books are safe, though.
Possibly, I know people who have been driving drunk for decades without an accident. Dumb luck and random chance always play a big part of anything. Why tempt fate? That call, text, or Star Trek episode will wait.
Sony did lot's of bad things in the past indeed, but they're are under the new leadership(Kaz Hirai) since Q1 last year and since them they've been doing quite a lot great things.
Maybe, but they've been screwing over their customers for a decade and the new guy has a LONG way to go before his company is the least bit trustworthy. Trust must be earned.
I'm curious, why did you put that apostrophe in the third quoted word?
I found this story puzzling, I would have expected Sony to do this rather than Microsoft. The fight against "piracy" is the fight against indie media, since the indies use the internet to get the word out and the mainstream monsters don't need it.
Nobody ever lost a dime to noncommercial infringement, but many great artists have starved from obscurity (very good example being Van Gogh, who only sold one painting for ten bucks in today's money, to his brother, to pay a debt). The fight against "piracy" is a fight against their indie competition, who DO cost them sales; fifty bucks I give Indie A is fifty bucks I don't have to give to MAFAA B.
Before CD burners and the internet the creator was dependent on publishers, but publishers are no longer needed. Publishers hate and fear the internet, with good reason.
Since Sony has publishing arms and MS doesn't this is really weird. Maybe MS is deliberately trying to kill the ex-box like it did FoxPro? It would make sense if Sony did it, but not Microsoft.
This pisses me off, as a former Sony victim I want that company to die horribly. Come on, Sony, follow Microsoft's lead and let Nintendo have the game business!
The book I'm working on right now is set only ten million years in the future, mankind has evolved into four distinct species, and has two warring planets manufacturing neutron stars as weapons.
I'm sure long before the sun is a red giant we'll have already been living on Ganymede and everywhere else, and possibly other star systems. Either that or (more likely) we'll be long extinct.
The idea of terraforming Mars will be fantasy for a long time, though.
The thing is there really isn't a total extinction event. Well other than a supernova or being sucked into a black hole.
Four billion years ago a Mars sized planet smashed into the Earth and splashed, leaving the earth's surface molten and creating rings around it. The rings gravitationally coalesced into the moon. If Earth had harbored life when Earth had no moon, it would have all been obliterated. And supernovas have caused mass extinctions on earth before, but having people on Mars would also die from a supernova powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth.
We should be thinking about terraforming Ganymede, since a few billion years from now the sun will become a red giant and the three innermost planets will be swallowed by it. In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time they moved the Earth to Jupiter's orbit when the sun swelled.
I guess I've come to believe that life will evolve to meet just about any condition
It has to exist to evolve, and we still know little about life's beginnings. It may well be that life can survive and adapt but that it's still not be conducive to life's formation.
I find it interesting that oxygen was poisonous to Earth's first life forms.
Can we just pick some bacteria and launch them up there? It's going to happen eventually, anyway. Might as well get it over with.
Rather than just destroying them, why not use them? An astronaut will need a pressure suit to walk around outside anyway since the air pressure is so low. This story got me curious, so I hit wikipedia.
They have been used for more than fifty years to treat thyroid disorders. They are used extensively within the pyrotechnics industry, and ammonium perchlorate is also a component of solid rocket fuel. Lithium perchlorate, which decomposes exothermically to produce oxygen, is used in oxygen "candles" on spacecraft, submarines, and in other situations where a reliable backup oxygen supply is needed.
I'm running kubuntu, which is very windows-like except with the power and features of open source and lacking most of Windows' shortcomings. I have one very old tower running XP and only use that one for converting vinyl and cassette to CD; I haven't found a viable alternative to EAC on Linux. I'll have to take that box off of my network when Microsoft stops supporting it (the assholes). EAC is a free app, but not open source. Audacity lacks a critical feature EAC has.
The only thing keeping Windows on this notebook is laziness (well, I'm too busy working on Nobots. I should sweep my floor).
Realistically you have three options: Vote republican, vote democrat, or throw away your vote.
Not at all, that's a fallacy perpetrated by Republicans, Democrats, and the MSM. If you smoke pot and vote for either of those parties, you're voting to throw yourself in prison! If you don't smoke pot, some of your friends and loved ones do and you're voting for prison for them.
A vote for the main two is a vote for the status quo, your vote says you're happy with the way things are*. A vote for one of the other three viable parties, the ones who are on enough ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning if the MSM covered them is a vote of protest, a far more powerful statement than a write in vote for Mickey Mouse and far better than what most folks do when they hate both mainstream candidates, which is to just stay home.
* The one exception I can think of was when John Ashcroft lost his Senate seat to a dead man. Voting him out of office did no good at all, as Bush appointed him Attorney General right away.
You should have logged on. I hope a couple of moderators saw it because it deserved to be seen (probably did, the comment I'm responding to is sitting at 4).
Each balloon is 15m (49.2ft) in diameter - the length of a small plane - and filled with lifting gases. Electronic equipment hangs underneath including radio antennas, a flight computer, an altitude control system and solar panels to power the gear. Google aims to fly the balloons in the stratosphere, 20km (12 miles) or more above the ground, which is about double the altitude used by commercial aircraft and above controlled airspace. Each should stay aloft for about 100 days and provide connectivity to an area stretching 40km in diameter below as they travel in a west-to-east direction. (Citation)
I wish that guy would get an account, I would have never seen his comment if it wasn't that there were only two comments (in the last half hour!) higher than -1. Far better FA than the one linked in TFS.
Slashdot Mirror
Some people act out of pure malice. There IS such thing as people who not only don't contribute, they have a SUBSTANTIAL net negative effect on a project, and they are doing it on purpose. This is destructive behavior and it should be eliminated.
The only way to deal with a troll is to ignore the troll. If he pisses you off, he's won.
Well good for you. What if it was 95% negative?
Then what I was doing probably sucked and I should listen to them. If it was 95% positive, I changed the content/presentation/whatever and then I got 95% negative (e.g. KDE4) I'd know I fucked up badly and try to fix it. Being a prima dona is counterproductive. You can't please everybody but if you're pleasing nobody you're doing it wrong.
How would you like to work with a dead, maggot-infested cat on your desk, or in a room with flickering lights, or with loud rap/country/ska/harpsichord/whatever music playing
I'd quit and do the same thing somewhere else.
What if you sat on a barstool and your boss kicked it out from under you every time he walked by?
I'd have him arrested for assault.
Ask any sociologist "do negative people have a negative effect on a group's performance?" and you will hear a "yes" EVERY FUCKING TIME.
It's not just science, it's common sense. If there's a group of devs on your team and one is negative, kick him out of the group. If he's not part of the group then ignore him. Feeding trolls is counterproductive.
If he's your fan, politely set him straight. If he's your competitor's fan, ignore him like you would a troll. If he's a fan that's complaining that you ruined his favorite feature you should reevaluate what you did.
Your sig: You should list the URL in your /. account/options, and maybe even mirror it in a /. journal.
I always hesitate to click on shortened URLs but took a chance after looking at your comment history.
Plus, the idea of robots with emotions is a stupid idea, as the late Douglas Adams so hilariously lampooned in HHGTG. When it's robots it's machines. You're not supposed to take it seriously, and emotional machines reminds you of this. They're androids, not replicants.
Don't anthropomorphize machines, they hate it when you do that.
Not voting is also a vote. When there is no real difference between the candidates offered, how do you protest?
Everyone I know who doesn't vote says this. Corporate media says it's apathy, so your vote doesn't count! You're voting for the status quo. And corporate media says that a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote.
You, or if not you then some of your friends or family smoke marijuana. Voting for someone who wants your cousin jailed for growing a plant is far worse than a wasted vote, and the Republicans and Democrats are both prohibitionist parties. If you're conservative, vote Libertarian. If you;re liberal than vote Green. Liberal and Green are votes for "none of the above". Not going to the polls means you're fine with how things are.
"If you choose not to decide you still have made a choice" -- Rush.
Careful, there are a few right wing loonies around here. You should point out that the quote was from the Canadian band Rush's lyrics. Or put on your asbestos suit.
Even though neither moderation or editing what shows up on your own site is censorship, I agree completely, that's how you should moderate and is how I moderate. After all, "overrated" is just a polite way of saying "-1, brain-dead stupid" when it doesn't mean "not bad but it doesn't deserve a +4."
I don't care what people do on the websites they own. If there are too many trolls and not enough reasoned discussion I leave. If it looks like they're editing, I'll leave. If the site annoys me, I leave.
As to goatse, I don't follow shortened URLs any more.
The AC above said I should browse at -1, why? I've seen few comments at -1 that are worth seeing. If I want to read one, I can. But even as fast as I read I can't finish the internet and it's senseless to browse at -1 unless I'm moderating.
You just told the trolls that they won by publicly bitching about them.
You should be moderated insightful. One of the biggest rules of the internet is Don't feed the trolls.
Help is available for those addicted to feeding the trolls, Biters Anonymous.
Really? How about the idea that having a bunch of lame-ass mooches, trolls, and flamers causing nothing but drama increases the stress level of developers and causes them to abandon projects entirely?
And that excuses censorship? Pretty damned cowardly, if you ask me. Stress levels is an excuse for censorship?
The projects don't complete or get kicked way back on deadline waiting for someone else to pick them up, learn the code, learn to extend it, and finish it off. If they ever do, since those same lame-ass trolls and flamers are waiting to pounce again.
That's just pathetic. If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen. Nobody's irreplaceable. If it gets behind schedule it gets behind schedule. Nobody's life is on the line here.
OR, the lame-ass trolls need to grow up.
Yes, they should. They annoy me, too. Let me know if you ever figure out a way to make that happen.
Look, I get it. You're 14, you live in your parents' basement, and to you swearing is only nominally less exciting than a furtive glimpse at a pair of tits. You think it makes you sound grown up.
I'm 61 years old. I was in South East Asia in the USAF at the end of the Vietnam war. Your reading comprehension isn't too good, did you miss the part where I ran a popular Quake site from my crib, since according to you I was an infant? Do you realize how stupid that makes you look?
But there's a right way and a wrong way to phrase things, a right way and a wrong way to handle conflict, and a right and wrong way to deal with drama.
When someone advocates censorship, the only rational response is FUCK OFF AND DIE. That's exactly what profanity is for, to demonstrate beyond all doubt that this kind of shit pisses you off. The fact that an open source guy advocates censorship pisses me off. It wouldn't have bothered me if it had come from a Microsoft or Apple employee, I'd have thought it was hilarious.
I ran self-censorship when I had that web site, until the very end when some of the same crap spewed from an opinion on one of the bigger sites saying the same as this. I thought "wait a minute, this isn't a children's site." There was vulgarity afterwords, albeit in moderation. The same when I started my /. account (a fourteen year old with a five digit UID?), although I didn't comment much. Same with K5 before it died some time after I left.
You would not like my journals, the characters are "colorful" for lack of a better word.
"I don't like censorship, darn it" just doesn't cut it. Even FUCK CENSORSHIP AND THE HORSE IT RODE IN ON is too mild.
Hell, the reason I never made the jump to using Linux on the desktop was my own experiences trying to set up a Mythbox in my living room; because I didn't have the exact hardware that one of the developers had, asked for some help, got shouted at "RTFM you fucking loser" over and over again when the documentation was crap and had no relevance to the situation I was asking about... screw it.
I've heard that story before, but never experienced it myself when I was learning Linux at the turn of the century. Maybe things have changed since then, but obviously people shouldn't act like that. I don't like what they do and wonder if maybe they're really enemies of open source (MS shills; MS hates "open sores" and called it a cancer), but everyone has the right to be a jerk, and nobody has a right to not be offended.
For fucks' sake, guys, do you two work for Apple or Microsoft? Every big corporation is evil, but when they do good is not the time to bash them, no matter what their real motives are.
If you don't work for Apple or MS, grow the fuck up. Sheesh. Dumb kids... the enemy of my enemy is my friend. If they're not against you they're for you.
That's what happens when your government can't be bothered to follow its own laws.
Know what else happens? People stop respecting the law, look what happened during Prohibition.
I read it. Pretty lame, and I've been using KDE for ten years (skipped 4, it sucked). There wasn't one rational reason stated why censorship is a good thing, just WAAH!! OMG, TROLLS AND FLAMERS!
I can't agree with a single thing he said in the article. If you get even the tiniest bit of recognition you're going to have that. From 1998 to 2002 I had a fairly popular Quake site that was popular enough that every mega site wanted to host me. Yeah, I got hate mail, but not much, and so fucking what anyway? 95% of the mail was YOU ROCK, DUDE!!
This guy needs to grow up and grow a pair. Haters don't hurt open source, and BTW, I HATE GNOME!
Good point.
The facts are that Sony isn't doing well. At all.
Yes, I've seen that, and it makes me happy.
I wish I could find a link to the story, but a few years ago a book publisher commissioned a study to see how much in sales he was losing to piracy. Since it takes a few weeks for pirate versions of books to show up, they looked at sales figures to see how much sales dropped when the pirate version was available. The researchers and publisher were amazed to discover that rather than a drop in sales, there was a spike in sales!
Corey Doctorow credits his status as a best selling author to the fact that he puts his ebooks on boingboing for free.
Of course there will be a few folks like your friend, but study after study has shown that music pirates spend a lot more money on music than non-pirates. No study except some commissioned by the RIAA or MPAA has shown loss in sales caused by piracy.
DRM often causes me to pirate. I'll buy a DVD and after fifteen minutes of unskippable piracy warnings and trailers I'll get a torrent started to get a non-cripppled version of it.
The irony of DRM is that it's never stopped a single pirate, but it's driven customers to piracy because the pirate version is usually just better.
Pirating software is just plain stupid, you're begging to be pwned. Music, movies, and books are safe, though.
can I drive 200,000 miles drunk?
Possibly, I know people who have been driving drunk for decades without an accident. Dumb luck and random chance always play a big part of anything. Why tempt fate? That call, text, or Star Trek episode will wait.
Sony did lot's of bad things in the past indeed, but they're are under the new leadership(Kaz Hirai) since Q1 last year and since them they've been doing quite a lot great things.
Maybe, but they've been screwing over their customers for a decade and the new guy has a LONG way to go before his company is the least bit trustworthy. Trust must be earned.
I'm curious, why did you put that apostrophe in the third quoted word?
I found this story puzzling, I would have expected Sony to do this rather than Microsoft. The fight against "piracy" is the fight against indie media, since the indies use the internet to get the word out and the mainstream monsters don't need it.
Nobody ever lost a dime to noncommercial infringement, but many great artists have starved from obscurity (very good example being Van Gogh, who only sold one painting for ten bucks in today's money, to his brother, to pay a debt). The fight against "piracy" is a fight against their indie competition, who DO cost them sales; fifty bucks I give Indie A is fifty bucks I don't have to give to MAFAA B.
Before CD burners and the internet the creator was dependent on publishers, but publishers are no longer needed. Publishers hate and fear the internet, with good reason.
Since Sony has publishing arms and MS doesn't this is really weird. Maybe MS is deliberately trying to kill the ex-box like it did FoxPro? It would make sense if Sony did it, but not Microsoft.
This pisses me off, as a former Sony victim I want that company to die horribly. Come on, Sony, follow Microsoft's lead and let Nintendo have the game business!
The book I'm working on right now is set only ten million years in the future, mankind has evolved into four distinct species, and has two warring planets manufacturing neutron stars as weapons.
I'm sure long before the sun is a red giant we'll have already been living on Ganymede and everywhere else, and possibly other star systems. Either that or (more likely) we'll be long extinct.
The idea of terraforming Mars will be fantasy for a long time, though.
The thing is there really isn't a total extinction event. Well other than a supernova or being sucked into a black hole.
Four billion years ago a Mars sized planet smashed into the Earth and splashed, leaving the earth's surface molten and creating rings around it. The rings gravitationally coalesced into the moon. If Earth had harbored life when Earth had no moon, it would have all been obliterated. And supernovas have caused mass extinctions on earth before, but having people on Mars would also die from a supernova powerful enough to destroy all life on Earth.
We should be thinking about terraforming Ganymede, since a few billion years from now the sun will become a red giant and the three innermost planets will be swallowed by it. In Larry Niven's A World Out of Time they moved the Earth to Jupiter's orbit when the sun swelled.
I guess I've come to believe that life will evolve to meet just about any condition
It has to exist to evolve, and we still know little about life's beginnings. It may well be that life can survive and adapt but that it's still not be conducive to life's formation.
I find it interesting that oxygen was poisonous to Earth's first life forms.
Can we just pick some bacteria and launch them up there? It's going to happen eventually, anyway. Might as well get it over with.
Rather than just destroying them, why not use them? An astronaut will need a pressure suit to walk around outside anyway since the air pressure is so low. This story got me curious, so I hit wikipedia.
I'm running kubuntu, which is very windows-like except with the power and features of open source and lacking most of Windows' shortcomings. I have one very old tower running XP and only use that one for converting vinyl and cassette to CD; I haven't found a viable alternative to EAC on Linux. I'll have to take that box off of my network when Microsoft stops supporting it (the assholes). EAC is a free app, but not open source. Audacity lacks a critical feature EAC has.
The only thing keeping Windows on this notebook is laziness (well, I'm too busy working on Nobots. I should sweep my floor).
Realistically you have three options: Vote republican, vote democrat, or throw away your vote.
Not at all, that's a fallacy perpetrated by Republicans, Democrats, and the MSM. If you smoke pot and vote for either of those parties, you're voting to throw yourself in prison! If you don't smoke pot, some of your friends and loved ones do and you're voting for prison for them.
A vote for the main two is a vote for the status quo, your vote says you're happy with the way things are*. A vote for one of the other three viable parties, the ones who are on enough ballots to have a mathematical chance of winning if the MSM covered them is a vote of protest, a far more powerful statement than a write in vote for Mickey Mouse and far better than what most folks do when they hate both mainstream candidates, which is to just stay home.
* The one exception I can think of was when John Ashcroft lost his Senate seat to a dead man. Voting him out of office did no good at all, as Bush appointed him Attorney General right away.
You should have logged on. I hope a couple of moderators saw it because it deserved to be seen (probably did, the comment I'm responding to is sitting at 4).
Each balloon is 15m (49.2ft) in diameter - the length of a small plane - and filled with lifting gases. Electronic equipment hangs underneath including radio antennas, a flight computer, an altitude control system and solar panels to power the gear. Google aims to fly the balloons in the stratosphere, 20km (12 miles) or more above the ground, which is about double the altitude used by commercial aircraft and above controlled airspace. Each should stay aloft for about 100 days and provide connectivity to an area stretching 40km in diameter below as they travel in a west-to-east direction. (Citation)
I wish that guy would get an account, I would have never seen his comment if it wasn't that there were only two comments (in the last half hour!) higher than -1. Far better FA than the one linked in TFS.